GUANTANAMO BAY — I’ll be heading into the courtroom for Day 2 of Omar Khadr’s pre-trial hearing shortly, and that means I’ll be unable to provide any updates until I leave the super-secure facility (no cellphones, no computing devices of any kind, no nothing) around lunchtime. But something I wasn’t More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — There were doubts, after yesterday’s late-breaking release of the Manual for military commissions, whether this morning’s pre-trial hearing to suppress Omar Khadr’s statements to interrogators would go forward at all. Now, the hearing’s about to get underway — whether Col. Pat Parrish, the military judge in More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — This morning, attorneys for Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen charged with murder, conspiracy and material support for terrorism, will attempt to persuade a military judge to exclude from his military commission every statement Khadr made to a U.S. interrogator. They will argue, as they have in More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — A source from the convening authority for the military commissions just informed the press corps that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has finally signed and issued a Manual for the Military Commissions Act of 2009. It’s 7:30 p.m. as I write this. Approximately 13 and a half More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — David Iglesias, who in a previous professional incarnation was a U.S. attorney fired by the Bush administration for insufficient loyalty to the Republican Party, began his career as a defense counsel in the Navy JAG corps. Now he’s a prosecutor again, this time for the much-criticized and More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor of the military commissions-turned-critic, has an opinion piece in the Huffington Post expressing disappointment in President Obama for not keeping his campaign pledges to shutter Guantanamo and end the commissions. (Davis might have considered that More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — The military commission for Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen held here since 2002 and charged with killing a U.S. soldier, doesn’t get underway until Wednesday morning. An idle press corps, even in the balmy Antillean spring, doesn’t make for a contented beast, so the media handlers at More…
GUANTANAMO BAY — The first surprise of the first full-blown hearing of the military commissions under President Obama? The presence of David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney from New Mexico purged by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for insufficient political fealty to the Republican Party. Iglesias, a reservist Navy captain, More…
Starting this week, something will happen that was never supposed to when Barack Obama took the oath of office. A military commission meeting at Guantanamo Bay nearly five months after Obama said the detention facility would cease to exist will hold a pre-trial hearing for Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen More…
Adam Serwer, fresh from a trip to Guantanamo Bay to see a proceeding in an Obama-era military commission, draws some conclusions about the administration’s national security approach:
The detention camps have become more bearable for the detainees, with 85 percent of them now living communally, up from around 40
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